A while ago I was watching “Rome , a TV series about ancient Rome at the time of Julius Caesar, and was struck by this scene: At a dinner, the newly appointed Senator Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and his wife Niobe (Indira Varma) are telling their daughter that it’s about time she got married.
When they were poor she was engaged to a butcher’s boy but as they went up the social ladder, thanks to their military patron Caesar himself, they give up on that and now insist that their little girl marry a “rich old man .
Predictably she wants to marry someone she loves who is her age. They find that whole notion ridiculous.
Something struck me about this all too familiar altercation. What’s wealth got to go with age?
In the olden day’s wealth was the result of either agriculture or trade, and even merchants made their money from trading in things taken from nature, either raw materials or agricultural goods. Both processes take time – planting seeds, watering crops, harvesting, reseeding – hence the only people who get rich are those who have been around long enough to have produced a lot of crops and sold them, i.e. rich old men.
The notion of ‘get rich quick’ was completely alien to the ancients.
Everything depends on the slow accumulation of wealth, and in a way that depends on the cycle of life and death – in agricultural and in the human lifespan.
Presto: the Egyptian mindset when it comes to wealth and marriage; with girls being auctioned off to older men while boys begin to “aanis (pass their marital sell-by date, enter spinsterhood).
A famous, and dearly departed, international relations theorist Susan Strange had a nifty critique of Marxists and their out-of-date understanding of, ironically, capitalism. They keep talking about the ‘accumulation of wealth’ as if money only comes from the productive, real economy of industry, where you have to manufacture tangible things and sell them to people who get their income from such tangible manufacturing jobs.
This is balderdash in the new globalized financial economy where money can literally be made from money through stock and currency speculation, among other instruments. Hence, ‘hot money’, where the tiniest little change in a country’s currency exchange rate or economic performance can cause colossal sums to flow out, or in, and wreck the real economy. All this took place in what she also famously termed ‘casino capitalism’, where speculators were betting on the economic fates of entire nations. (No wonder Mahatir Mohammad was so angry at George Soros, as many fellow Europeans are too).
If you pursue this thread other revelations follow. Egyptian Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail was once complaining about how Egyptian academics and intellectuals would have none of his recommendations concerning building centers of excellence and the positive impact that can have on the economy and society, insisting as they did on how ‘achievement’ is the long, long, long-term result of civilisation endeavors around bodies of water!I recognized this straight away. It’s Ibn Khaldoun (Al-Tarakum Al-tarikhi, Historical Accumulation). But that’s pre-industrial, agricultural thinking, never mind pre-finance economics. Even if you look at the economic discipline itself, you find that Marxists understand labor as a wealth, hence encouraging child birth – China found out the consequences of that the hard way. Older economic schools, such as the Physiocrats, understood wealth in agricultural terms too. Sounds just like the problem we have over here with the falaheen (Delta peasants) and sa’ayda (Upper Egyptians) who insist on having too many children because they think they are increasing their wealth, their ‘capital’.
There are other more strictly social factors too, such as women having too many babies to prevent husbands from spending all their money on their parents and siblings and sa’ayda wanting to have sons to fight rival families and clans, but attitudes towards time and wealth are more deep-seated and less obvious to the untrained eye that they disappear from the social reform radar altogether.
Emad El-Din Aysha is a Cairo-based commentator and lecturer at the American University in Cairo.
